NICKEL MINES, Pa. – A gunman killed six people at a
one-room Amish schoolhouse Monday morning in Pennsylvania's
bucolic Lancaster County, the county coroner said.

State police said several others were injured and taken to
hospitals.

“There are a number dead. The exact number I am not sure at this point. There are also a number of wounded. And the shooter is not at large,” said state police Corporal Ralph Striebig of the schoolhouse was in rural Lancaster County.

Striebig could not say how many students were taken hostage but said that “a number of students” were shot.

The hostage-taker was either killed or captured at the scene. “One or the other, but he's not at large,” Striebig said.

Amish schools typically group students from the first through eighth grade – aged about six to 14 – in the same schoolhouse, so the victims were likely “teens or pre-teens. They're all in one school from first grade up,” Striebig said.

The Amish people dress and live simply in Lancaster County farm country, shunning modern machines and vhicles including cars and cultivating their land using old-fashioned traditions.

The incident happened at Georgetown Amish School in Bart Township.

The shooting in Pennsylvania followed reports earlier on Monday of lockdowns at two Las Vegas area schools as police searched for an armed youth, local television reported.

Last Friday a 15-year-old student killed his school's principal in western Wisconsin.

Last Wednesday a drifter took six female high school students hostage, molested them and then shot one to death and killed himself as police closed in.